‘Christ is Risen from the Dead, the First Fruits of Those who have
Died’

Introduction

I am very
grateful for the invitation to participate in this assembly, and for your
welcome and hospitality to my wife and myself. It is good to be here in Rome
once again, and among friends.

I am
particularly glad to be able to say something on the subject of the
Resurrection of Jesus, within the overall topic of ‘Jesus, our Contemporary’.
There is already here a considerable paradox. On the one hand, it is precisely
because Jesus is risen from the dead that he is alive in a new, unique way;
that he is able to be with us as a living presence, which we know in prayer and
silence, in reading scripture and in the sacraments, and (not least) in the
service of the poor. All those things he has promised us, and his promises do
not fail. He is, in that sense, truly our contemporary. But at the same time,
as our title indicates, in his resurrection Jesus stands over against us. He is
different. He is the first fruits; we are the harvest that still awaits. He has gone on ahead while we wait behind. What is
more, the meaning of his resurrection cannot be reduced to anything so
comfortable as simple regarding him as ‘contemporary’ in the sense of a friend
beside us, a smiling and comforting presence. Because he is raised from the
dead, he is Lord of the world, sovereign over the whole cosmos, the one before
whom we bow the knee, believing that in the end every creature will come to do
so as well.

The title I have
been given is a quotation from St Paul, in the first letter to the Corinthians.
This is a famous and central passage and I shall return to it in due course.
But I want to begin with some wider reflections about the resurrection: about
the event and its meaning.[1] I want
to draw out some of the challenges we meet today when speaking of the
resurrection not only in the wider world, where the idea is of course still
mocked, but also in the church, where we have had a bad habit of belittling and
domesticating this most explosive of all moments.

1.Resurrection
in the First Century

We begin with
the central meaning of resurrection in the first century. After generations of
confusion we must reaffirm that the Greek word anastasis and its cognates really
do refer to a new bodily life given to a human body that had been dead. Anastasis was not
a clever or metaphorical way of speaking of a ‘spiritual’ or ‘non-bodily’
survival of death. The ancient Greeks and Romans had plenty of ways of speaking
of such a thing, and anastasis
was not one of them. Some people still suggest that when the first disciples
said that Jesus had been raised from the dead what they really meant was that
his cause, his kingdom-agenda, would continue, or that they had a sense of his
continuing presence with them, forgiving them their failures and encouraging
them to carry on with his work. Well, they did indeed believe his
kingdom-agenda was going on, and they did believe he had reconstituted them to
carry that work forward; but the reason they believed both of those things was
because they really did believe he had been bodily raised from the dead,
leaving an empty tomb behind him. This was not, as is sometimes suggested, a
mere ‘resuscitation’, a return to exactly the same sort of bodily life as
before; but nor was it a translation into a non-bodily mode. When Paul
describes the resurrection body as ‘spiritual’, the word he uses does not mean
‘a body composed of spirit’, but ‘a
body animated by spirit’ – or, in
this case, by God’s spirit.[2]

I have argued elsewhere
that we cannot understand the historical rise of the early Christian movement
unless we take as basic their belief that Jesus really was raised in this
bodily sense. Of course, one might say that they were mistaken; but I have also
argued that the best reason for the rise of that belief is that it really did
happen. The other explanations – that the disciples were the victims of a
delusion, that one or more of them saw a vision of Jesus such as has often been
reported by people after someone they love has died, and so on – simply do not
hold water historically. To mention only the last of these: such visions were
as well known in the ancient world as they are today, and the meaning of a
vision like that was not that the person was suddenly alive again, but rather
that they were indeed well and truly dead.

But I want to
move on from that argument. This is not only because I and others have made the
case at some length already. It is also because it is easy to be distracted by
the question ‘but did it happen?’ from the question ‘but what does it mean?’ As
we consider Jesus our contemporary, the event remains vital but the meaning is
all-important. We in the church have often downgraded the meaning into terms of
private spirituality or the hope of heaven; but it goes far deeper and wider
than that.

The question
‘But did it happen?’ was the question asked by the Enlightenment, not only
about the resurrection but about a great deal besides. Some devout Christians
have shied away from this question, believing with Proverbs 26.4 that if you
answer a fool according to his folly you will be a fool yourself. In this
instance, I have taken the opposite view, based on Proverbs 26.5, that you must
answer the fool according to his folly, otherwise he
will be wise in his own eyes. It remains enormously important that we
investigate the historical origins of Christianity. As the Holy Father himself
has insisted, what actually happened in the first century matters, because we
are not Gnostics: we believe in a God who came into the very stuff and
substance of our flesh and blood and died a real death.
Yes, and rose again three days later.

My argument,
however, is not that we can somehow ‘prove’ the resurrection of Jesus according
to some neutral, objective canon of plausibility. That would, indeed, be to
capitulate to the folly of the Enlightenment. My argument, rather, is that we
can, by historical investigation, reveal the folly of all the other
explanations that are sometimes given for how Christianity got going in the
first place. This forces us back to the much larger question, which of course
the Enlightenment did not want to face: might it after all be the case that the
closed worldview of some modern science is incorrect, and that the world is
after all created by and loved by a God who is not distant, detached and unable
to act within the world, but rather by a creator who remains mysteriously
present and active within the world in a thousand ways, some of them dramatic
and unexpected?

I have often
used as an illustration the idea of a college or school being given a wonderful
painting by an old member. The painting is so magnificent that it must be
displayed, but there is nowhere in the present college buildings that will do
it justice. Eventually the college decides to pull down some of its main
buildings and rebuild them with this picture as the central feature. Then, in
doing so, they discover that several things nobody really liked about the
college the way it used to be – the layout, the architecture, the inconvenient
rooms – were solved in the new arrangement. The gift was rightly given to the
college, but the college, in order to accept it, had itself to be transformed.
That, I suggest, is what happens with the resurrection. You can’t fit it (of
course) into the modernist worldview of the European Enlightenment. But, when
you dismantle the eighteenth-century Deism which insists on God and the world
being utterly separate, and when you demolish the pseudo-scientific prejudice
which says that the space-time world is a closed continuum of cause and effect,
you find that not only will the resurrection of Jesus make excellent sense; it
will address, and help you solve, all kinds of other things about the modern
worldview which have caused, and still cause, problems. We might, for a start,
look at the modern western systems of democracy and finance . . .

But
to return to the first century. Many Jews (not all) believed in
bodily resurrection as the ultimate destiny of all God’s people, perhaps of all
people. They clearly meant bodily
resurrection, as we see (for instance) in II Maccabees 7. But it won’t do
simply to say that the early Christians, being devout Jews, reached for that
category in their grief after the death of Jesus. The early Christian view of
resurrection is utterly Jewish, but significantly different from anything we
find in pre-Christian Judaism. There, ‘resurrection’ was something that was
supposed to happen to everyone at the end, not to one person in the middle of
history. Nor had anyone prior to the early Christians formulated the idea that
resurrection might mean the transformation
of a human body so that it was now still firmly a human body but also beyond
the reach of corruption, decay and death. Nor was there in
early Christianity, as there was in Judaism, a spectrum of belief about life
after death. They all believed in resurrection – that is, in a two-stage
post mortem reality: that those who belonged to Jesus would die, would then
rest ‘in the hand of God’ (Wisdom 3.1), and would then at a later stage be
raised. In some of my writings I have referred to the first stage as ‘life
after death’, and to the second as ‘life after life after death’.

One of the most
striking differences between Christian belief and pre-Christian Jewish belief
is that nobody expected the Messiah to be raised from the dead – for the
obvious reason that nobody expected the Messiah to be killed in the first
place. We have evidence for plenty of messianic or would-be messianic movements
in the century or so either side of Jesus. They routinely ended with the
violent death of the founder. When that happened, his followers faced a choice:
give up the movement, or find yourself a new leader. We have evidence of both.
Going around saying your leader had been raised from the dead was not an
option. Except in the case of the followers of Jesus of
Nazareth.

I conclude from
all this – which could of course be spelled out at much more length – that we
can only understand early Christianity as a movement that emerges from within
first-century Judaism, but that it is so unlike anything else we know in
first-century Judaism (and the unliknesses bear no
resemblance to anything in the pagan world) that we are forced to ask what
caused these mutations. The only plausible answer is that they were caused by
the actual bodily resurrection, into a transformed physicality, of Jesus
himself. Put that in place, and everything is explained. Take it away, and
everything remains puzzling and confused. Of course, there is a cost. One
cannot simply say, ‘Well, it looks as though Jesus of Nazareth was raised from
the dead’ and carry on with business as usual. If it happened, it means that a
new world has been born. That, ultimately, is the good news of Easter, the good
news which the rationalism of the Enlightenment has tried to screen out and
which the church, tragically, has often forgotten as well. But to address this
we need to move to the next section of this lecture.

2.From
Event to Meaning: The Four Gospels

I suggest, in fact,
that the rationalistic question ‘But did it happen?’, though highly important
and deserving of an answer, has also often functioned to prevent us thinking
through the question of what the resurrection of Jesus meant, and still means.
The church has often been content to do two things side by side: first, to
‘prove’ the resurrection by a more or less rationalistic argument; second, to
say that therefore ‘Jesus is alive today, and we can get to know him’, or
perhaps also, ‘therefore Jesus is the second person of the Trinity’. One also
frequently hears, especially in Easter sermons, ‘Jesus has been raised, therefore we too are going to heaven’. All this is a
way of saying, within the same eighteenth-century framework, that the Christian
claim is true and the sceptical claims are false.

That is fine as
far as it goes. But it doesn’t go nearly far enough. And in fact,
interestingly, the New Testament itself does not make those connections in the
same way. There is a real danger that we will simply short-circuit the process
and force the resurrection to mean what we want it to mean, without paying
close attention to what the first Christians actually said. In the closing
chapters of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and in the opening chapter of Acts,
we do not find anyone saying that because Jesus is alive again we can now get
to know him, or that he is the second person of the Trinity (though Thomas does
say ‘My Lord and my God’). We do not, in particular, hear anyone in the gospels
saying that because Jesus has been raised we are assured of our place in
heaven. What we do hear, loud and clear in the resurrection narratives and in
the early theology of Paul, is something like this.

To begin with,
Jesus was crucified as a messianic pretender; all the gospels say that the
words ‘King of the Jews’ were stuck up above his head.
The resurrection appears, then, to reverse the verdict of the Jewish court and
the Roman trial: Jesus really was God’s Messiah. But at this point hardly any
modern Christians have realised the significance of the Jewish vision of the
Messiah, going back to passages like Isaiah 11 and Psalms 2 and 72.[3]
The point about Israel’s Messiah is that when he appears he will be king, not
of Israel only, but of the whole world. Paul’s vision, that ‘at the name of
Jesus every knee shall bow’, is an essentially messianic vision before it is even a vision of Jesus as the second
person of the Trinity, though it is that as well, and Paul believed the two
were made to fit together.

But unless we
grasp the essentially Jewish vision of Messiahship,
and the early Christian belief that Jesus was the Messiah based on his
resurrection, we won’t get to the heart of it. ‘Jesus our contemporary’ is
Jesus the Jew, Jesus the Messiah, Jesus the one who launched God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven. For many
centuries the western church has done its best to avoid the plain meaning of
the four gospels, and the Enlightenment pushed us further away yet. The gospels
build on the ancient Jewish belief that God’s call to Abraham was the call of a
people through whom he would rescue humans and the world from their plight. The
long history of that people often seemed to have lost its way, but the four
gospels tell the story of Jesus, climaxing in his death and resurrection, as
the story of how God’s plan for Israel, and his plan through Israel for the world, was fulfilled at last. The
resurrection of Jesus means what it means in the four gospels because it is the
fulfilment of that vision and hope.
It is the moment when, as Jesus himself explains to the disciples on the road
to Emmaus, all that the prophets had spoken was now fulfilled. ‘We had hoped,’
said the sad and puzzled pair, ‘that he was the one to redeem Israel’; and now
the risen Jesus explains that he has not only redeemed Israel but is sending
this redeemed Israel – his Spirit-equipped and scripturally-taught followers –
out into the world with the message that Israel’s God is its true and rescuing
lord and king.[4]

If Jesus’
resurrection is the fulfilment of Israel’s story, it is also, and for the same
reason, the fulfilment of the story of God himself. Here we have to be careful.
How easy it is for us, with our developed Trinitarian theology, to rush in with
Augustine or Aquinas, with Gregory or Athanasius. Let’s put that on hold for
the moment and think about how first-century Jews were telling the story of
Israel’s God. Israel’s God had abandoned Jerusalem and the Temple at the time
of the exile. Ezekiel, who describes the divine glory leaving the Temple,
promises that this glory will return, but never tells us that it’s happened. In
fact, several prophets speak of YHWH coming back to Zion as the climax of the
return from exile, but nowhere does anyone say it’s happened. Isaiah spoke of
‘the glory of YHWH being revealed, and all flesh seeing it together’ (40.5),
and of Jerusalem’s watchmen shouting for joy because they could see YHWH in
plain sight, returning to Zion (52.8). But nobody ever suggested, throughout
the four centuries of post-exilic Judaism, that it had happened at last.
Zechariah says it will happen (14.5). Malachi, addressing the bored priests,
insists that ‘The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple’ (3.1).
But he hasn’t done so yet.

But the
evangelists tell the story of Jesus precisely as the story of how YHWH returned
to Zion at last, unexpectedly, shockingly and shamefully. That isn’t our
subject today, but I suggest that this, with all its overtones of the Jewish
expectation of Israel’s God returning to the Temple, is at the very heart of New
Testament Christology. Suffice it to say that when we come to the resurrection
accounts, the case has already been made. Matthew and Mark insist that at
Jesus’ baptism the prophecies of Isaiah and Malachi began to be fulfilled. Luke
says that when Jesus came to Jerusalem the residents did not know the time of
their divine visitation.[5]
This, in other words, was the moment when YHWH came back at last. John says
‘the word became flesh, and tabernacled in our midst,
and we beheld his glory’ (1.14): in other words, Jesus is the revelation of
God’s glory, returning to his people at last in the form of the temple which is
his body. That is the reason why, balancing that opening statement in John
1.14, we find Thomas in 20.28 declaring ‘My Lord and my God’. He is seeing and
recognising the glory of God in the face, and in the wounded hands and side, of
the risen Jesus. We never knew God’s glory would look like that.

You see, it is
all too easy for us to slip into a form of docetism at this point: to think, simply, ‘Well, the
resurrection proves that Jesus is divine’, and to forget the rich human
dimensions of the story. But our theme this week demands that we recognise in
the resurrection that (so to speak) the divine is Jesus: that in the man from
Nazareth we see not only Jesus our contemporary but also God our contemporary.
We recognise God standing before us, wounded for our trespasses and bruised for
our iniquities, and we hear the prophet say, ‘Who would have thought that he
was the Arm of the Lord?’[6]

So if Jesus’
resurrection, in the gospels, is the point where Israel’s story and even God’s
story come to their final climax, it is also of necessity the moment when the
church is truly born. Of course, there is a sense in which the church is born
with the call of Abraham; another sense in which the key moment is the call of
the first disciples; another again in which Pentecost is all-important. But we
cannot read the stories of the resurrection without realising that this is the
great turning-point, when a bunch of frightened and muddled men and women
stumbled despite themselves on the truth that world history had turned its
greatest corner, that a new power was let loose in the world, that a door had
been opened which no-one could shut. The church was born in that moment, not as
an institution, not as an inward-looking safe group, but precisely as a
surprised gaggle of people coming to terms with something far bigger than they
had dared or wanted to imagine. The church was born as Mary, Peter and John ran
to and fro in the half-light, half-believing and with tears and questions. The
church was born at the moment when the two disciples at Emmaus recognised the
stranger as he broke the loaf. The church was born as the angel told Jesus’
followers to hurry to Galilee because he was already on his way there. The
church was born as he opened their minds to understand the scriptures. And all
of this is in service of the mission of the kingdom. Something has happened in
the resurrection because of which Jesus is now the challenging contemporary not
only of his first followers, but of the whole world. He goes before us still,
and we have to hurry to catch him up.

Finally,
therefore, the resurrection stories bring to a head – by implication, but when
we learn to read the gospels properly the implication is very clear – the
challenge of the kingdom of God to the kingdoms of the world. Here I must, with
the greatest respect and admiration, take issue with the Holy Father in his
suggestion that the achievement of Jesus was to separate the religious from the
political. Of course there is a sense in which that is true, as the limitless
depths of divine love invite us to a lifetime of exploration which utterly
transcends all human life and national and international organisation. But each
of the evangelists, in their own ways, tells the story of Jesus as the story of
confrontation between Jesus and the Herod family, between Jesus and Caesar or
his representatives, and behind them between Jesus and the dark satanic powers
who shriek at him or plot against him. It was the powers of the world,
spiritual but also political, that put Jesus on the cross, and the resurrection
of Jesus our contemporary is therefore the victory of Jesus over all the powers
of the world. On Good Friday morning, in John 18 and 19, he argued with Pontius
Pilate about kingdom, truth and power, and when John goes on to tell the story
of the resurrection he wants us to see that kingdom, truth and power are reborn
in Jesus in a new form. It is then part of the church’s task to work out what
that will mean.

That is why
Paul, our earliest written witness, links the resurrection directly and messianically to the world sovereignty that is now claimed
by Jesus. At the climax of the theological argument of the letter to the Romans,
he quotes Isaiah 11: the root of Jesse rises – resurrects! – to
rule the nations, and in him the nations shall hope.[7]
And that looks back to, and confirms the interpretation of, the very opening of
Romans, in which the resurrection has publicly established Jesus, the Davidic
Messiah, as ‘son of God in power’ – in a world where ‘son of God’ meant,
unambiguously, Caesar himself. The political
meaning of the resurrection is, I think, one of the most profound reasons why,
in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the question was pushed back,
sneeringly, at the church: but did it happen? The Enlightenment philosophy,
which has shaped our contemporary world so radically, insisted that world history had turned its great corner in Europe and America in
the eighteenth century. It was, say the American
dollar bills to this day, ‘a new saeculum’. But if it is true that Jesus was raised from the
dead then it is Easter that is the great turning-point of world history. World
history cannot have two fulcrum moments. The Enlightenment’s own agenda was to
banish God upstairs out of sight, so that enlightened modern man could run the
world in his own way – and we have seen what a mess that has produced,
precisely where the Enlightenment was most at home. The church has gone along
for the ride, content to play out its private spirituality with a contemporary
Jesus who has been only a shadow of his true self. But the truly contemporary
Jesus is the one who confronts all the pretensions of today’s power just as he
confronted Pontius Pilate that first Good Friday; and the resurrection is the
sign that his kingdom, his truth and his power were the right kind. As the
grandiose ambitions of the European and American Enlightenment look more and
more threadbare, it is incumbent on the church to explore afresh the social,
cultural and political tasks to which we are committed by the resurrection of
Jesus our contemporary.

3.From
Event to Meaning: Paul

I turn now to the
passage from which my title is taken, 1 Corinthians 15. ‘The Messiah has been
raised from the dead, as the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.’ The
first fruits are offered, at the beginning of the harvest, as the sign that
there is much more to come. So it is with the Messiah, as we have already seen:
he has gone on ahead, and the rest of us will follow. This is one of the great
Christian innovations in eschatology: the notion of ‘resurrection’ has split in
two, and we live in between those two – Jesus’ resurrection and our own – not
indeed as passive spectators of an apocalyptic drama, but as active
participants. Jesus our contemporary enlists those who believe in him in what
we might call his resurrection project, his kingdom-project, his task of
bringing his sovereign and saving rule to bear on the whole world.

The point of 1
Corinthians 15 is, after all, to locate the future resurrection of believers
within the larger worldview of God’s kingdom. Verses 20-28 are Paul’s classic
statement of the kingdom of God, carefully nuanced: at the moment Jesus is
reigning, is ruling the world, and when he has finished by overcoming death
itself he will then hand the kingdom over to the Father, so that God may be
‘all in all’.[8]
To be grasped by the risen Jesus as our contemporary must mean being grasped by
this kingdom-vision, from which the western church, both Catholic and
Protestant, has so often and so sadly retreated. Of course, to our secular
contemporaries it makes no sense to suggest that Jesus is in charge of the
world, and has been since Easter. Most people look at the continuation of
violence, deceit and chaos over the last two thousand years and say it’s
ridiculous to say that Jesus is in charge. But when we read the gospels we get
a different sense. Think of the Beatitudes, not primarily as offering a
blessing to those who are described,
but through them to the world. This
is how Jesus wants to run the world: by calling people to be peacemakers,
gentle, lowly, hungry for justice. When God wants to change the world, he
doesn’t send in the tanks; he sends in the meek, the pure in heart, those who
weep for the world’s sorrows and ache for its wrongs. And by the time the
power-brokers notice what’s going on, Jesus’ followers have set up schools and hospitals, they have fed the hungry and cared for the
orphans and the widows. That’s what the early church was known for, and it’s
why they turned the world upside down. In the early centuries the main thing
that emperors knew about bishops was that they were always taking the side of
the poor. Wouldn’t it be good if it were the same today.
Death is the last enemy, according to Paul in this chapter, and we live in a
world that still deals in death as its main currency. If we claim Jesus as our
contemporary, we claim to know and love the one who has defeated death itself,
not with more death, not with superior killing power, but with the power of
love and new creation.

There is more,
much more, in what Paul says about Jesus our risen contemporary. I hardly dare
make this point but I must. As far as Paul is concerned, Jesus is the only human being who has so far been
raised from the dead, and he does not expect anyone else to be resurrected
until the Parousia. I suspect that other ideas crept
in many centuries later, not least once the mediaeval church lost its grip on
resurrection itself and reverted to what was basically an ancient pagan scheme
of a blissful and disembodied heaven and a terrible hell. That is a subject for
another time. But for Paul it is Jesus himself who is our contemporary, ruling
already and planning to return to complete his reign on earth as in heaven.
Christ is risen from the dead, the firstfruits
of those who sleep; and we who celebrate him as our contemporary are charged to
work with him on his kingdom-project in the present time. 1 Corinthians 15 is a
spectacular chapter, but one of the most remarkable verses in it is the last
(verse 58), where Paul doesn’t say ‘therefore enjoy the presence of Christ’,
though he might have done, or ‘therefore look forward to your glorious future’,
though he might have said that as well. He says ‘therefore get on with your work in the present, because in the Lord your labour
is not in vain.’ That is at the heart of the meaning of the resurrection. Because God is already making his new
creation, all that you do in Christ and by the Spirit is part of that new world.
Every cup of cold water, every tiny prayer, every confrontation with the
bullies who oppress the poor, every song of praise or dance of joy, every work
of art and music – nothing is wasted. The resurrection will reaffirm it, in
ways we cannot begin to imagine, as part of God’s new world. Resurrection isn’t
just about a glorious future. It is about a meaningful present. That is what it
means that Jesus, our contemporary, is raised from the dead as the firstfruits of those who slept.

4.Conclusion:
Resurrection and Vocation

I have said what
I want to say, but I cannot stop right there. Come back with me, as I close, to
John’s gospel, and to those final two chapters where we see the risen Jesus
meeting three key people: Mary, Thomas and then Peter. To know the risen Jesus
as our contemporary is to know him in these ways, always mysterious, always
deeply challenging. Much more could
be said on each, but I hope these brief reflections serve to anchor and focus
our entire theme.

First,
Mary Magdalene. She is the first to see the risen Lord,
and she mistakes him for the gardener. Quite right, too: because, for John,
this is the beginning of new creation, with the light breaking through into the
darkness of the early morning garden. Jesus and Mary are not exactly the new
Adam and Eve, but the resonances of the first garden, and of the healing of its
ancient wound, are powerfully present. And, as Mary looks through her tears and
sees, first the angels and then Jesus himself, we recognise not just a new
reality but a new way of knowing that
reality: a new creation which is to be known by the mourners, those who weep
for their loss, for the world’s loss. And Jesus’ answer to her stumbling
question is more powerful than our translations can acknowledge. Up to now, in
most texts, Mary has been referred to by her Greek name, Maria; but now, in most manuscripts, Jesus calls her by her Aramaic
name, Mariam: her original name, the
name her parents called her, his mother’s name. And in that fresh naming there
is also a commission: Mary, Miriam, is to be the apostle to the apostles, the
first to announce to anyone else that he is risen, that he is to be enthroned
as Lord of the world. There is an ocean of vocational reflection there in which
we can swim at our leisure.

Second, Thomas.
Thomas is quite different from Mary. No tears; just stubborn resistance. He
demands evidence. He wants to see, to touch. Thomas stands for so many in our culture who still ask, with the Enlightenment (though of
course the impetus is much older) ‘But is it true?’ He doesn’t want to live in
the imagined fantasy-world of someone else’s story. Reality or nothing for him
– and fair enough, since Israel’s God is the creator and Israel’s hope is for
the renewal of creation, not for an escape from creation into an imagined world
of fantasy. And Jesus meets Thomas fair and square. He doesn’t say, as some
theologians today would say, ‘No, Thomas, you’re coming at it the wrong way; we
don’t do scientific evidence here, you need a different epistemology.’ Yes,
there is a gentle but firm rebuke: Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet
believe. But this only comes after Jesus has first offered Thomas his hands and
his side. Evidence you want? Evidence you shall have. We are not told, however,
that Thomas did actually reach out his hand to touch. Instead, he takes a
flying leap past anything the others had yet said. Sometimes it is the doubters
who, when convinced, become the most insightful. ‘My Lord and
my God!’ It is the climax of the gospel; and I invite you to reflect on
the fact that it might not have happened this way had Thomas not asked his
question. I see there at least the beginnings of a parable about the nature of
knowledge, of all knowledge, in our own day.

Finally, Peter.
You are familiar, of course, with the story of the breakfast by the shore, and
I’m sure you are aware that the charcoal fire in John 21.9 is meant to remind
us, the readers, of the terrible moment in the High Priest’s hall by another
charcoal fire (John 18.18), when Peter three times denied even knowing Jesus.
No doubt the smell of it reminded Peter of that moment as well. If this little
story is the beginning of the true Petrine ministry,
as some have suggested, then we do well to notice that this ministry begins
with confrontation and penitence. ‘Simon, son of John, do you love me?’

It is a question
we all face, perhaps particularly those of us called to ministry and leadership
within the church. If we know our own hearts – and woe betide a church that is
led by people who do not – we know that we have all let Jesus down, that our
hearts and minds have plenty of memories of our own charcoal fires, of the
times when by our actions or words we have in effect denied that we even knew
Jesus. Yet Jesus comes, and comes again, and asks us the same question. ‘Do you
love me?’

The Greek text
makes it quite clear that Peter’s response uses a different word. He can’t
bring himself to say the word agapao, the word for that utter self-giving love that Jesus
himself has shown on the cross. He uses the word phileo: ‘Yes, Lord,’ he says, ‘You know I’m your
friend.’ That’s as far as he can go. Anything else would seem to be back in
the realm of blustering, of boasting: ‘Yes, Lord, I’m OK, I can do anything for
you.’ That’s what he’d said in the Upper Room (13.36-37). He is going to start
further back.

But then the
miracle: ‘Well then,’ replies Jesus, ‘feed my lambs.’ This is the moment we as
pastors and church leaders need to note most closely, the moment when the risen
Jesus becomes once more our uncomfortable contemporary. We expect, perhaps, a
note of rebuke: ‘Why did you let me down?’ We might hope for a word of
forgiveness: ‘Peter, you let me down, but I forgive you.’ What we do not expect
is a fresh word of commission: ‘Feed my lambs.’ Here is the miracle of
resurrection as it applies directly to vocation. All vocation to be pastors in the church of the risen Jesus comes in
the form of forgiveness. Forgiveness and commission turn out to be the same
thing. Forgiveness never simply brings us back to a neutral position; and
commission can never be on the basis that we are good people, well qualified, fully prepared for what we have to do. That was Peter’s
problem before. Now he begins again in the proper way: with penitence,
forgiveness, and fresh commission. That is the gift of the
risen Jesus to Peter, and please God to us as well.

But it doesn’t
stop there. Jesus asks the same question a second time and gets the same
answer, this time responding with ‘look after my sheep.’ But then, on the third
occasion, Jesus changes the question. Peter has said, ‘Yes, Lord, you know I’m
your friend.’ Now Jesus asks, ‘Simon, son of John, are you my friend?’ John, telling the story, indicates that Peter was
upset that on this third occasion Jesus used these words. Perhaps he thought
Jesus didn’t believe him, that he was challenging even the lesser claim that he
had made. I don’t read it like that. I think Jesus is saying, in effect, ‘Very
well, Peter: if that’s where you are, that’s where we’ll start. If you can say
you’re my friend, we will build on that. Now: feed my sheep.’ And then, of
course, he goes on to warn Peter of what is to come; this sheep-feeding
business will cost him not less than everything, as it had cost the master
Shepherd himself.

But this, for
me, stands at the heart of the message of Jesus our contemporary, the one who is
risen from the dead as the first-fruits of those who sleep. With the
resurrection, a new creation has dawned, and in that new creation new
possibilities are open before us. The resurrection is not the end of the story;
it’s the beginning of the new one, precisely because Jesus is the first-fruits
and the full harvest is yet to come. And we who are
called to work within that new creation, from the Petrine
ministry through to all other ministries, find those ministries not in a
grandiose claim or the blustering confidence that Peter had shown in the days
before Jesus’ death. We find our ministries given to us afresh day by day as we
confess our own failures and yet come, humbly, and say, ‘Yes, Lord, you know
I’m your friend.’ Resurrection and forgiveness are, after all, two sides of the
same coin; to believe in the one, you have to believe in the other. As Ludwig
Wittgenstein said, it is love that believes the resurrection. Here in John’s
gospel, in Mary, in Thomas, and above all in Peter, we discover what it means
to know the risen Jesus as our contemporary, wiping away our tears, answering
our hard questions, but above all inviting us to come with the humility and the
love through which the power of his risen life, his shepherding of his sheep,
can go to work afresh in our own day. This is what it means to know the risen
Jesus as our contemporary. ‘Yes, Lord,’ we say. ‘You know.’ ‘Well, then,’
replies Jesus, ‘feed my sheep.’

[1]Full details on more or less all aspects of
what follows can be found in N. T. Wright, The
Resurrection of the Son of God (London and Minneapolis: SPCK and FortressPress, 2003); Italian translation ; or Surprised by Hope (London and San
Francisco: SPCK and HarperSanFrancisco, 2007).

[2]
In any case, even ‘spirit’, in the world of Paul and his hearers, would most
likely have been understood in a quasi-physical manner, in line with Stoic
philosophy; but that’s another matter.